


Paul Newman and a Ride Home

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 5 Things, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-26
Updated: 2008-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:13:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five books Dean Winchester has read more than once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paul Newman and a Ride Home

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Amberlynne for looking it over.

1\. _The Runaway Bunny_ by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd

One of Dean's earliest memories is of being curled up on his mother's lap on a blanket out in the backyard. The sun is shining, and there are big fluffy white clouds in the blue sky. His father's not home from work yet, so it's just the two of them, which is maybe his favorite thing in the whole world, except for when they go for rides in the car. She's reading to him, and showing him the pictures, and letting him turn the pages like a big boy.

He can remember the smell of soap and grass on her skin, the way her hair shone like the sun, and the soft rhythm of her voice as she read. After each page, she would kiss him or nuzzle her face into his neck and whisper that he was her little bunny, and he would giggle and give her a hug.

When she's gone, when all that's left is the smell of smoke and the fear in Dad's eyes, Dean still remembers. Since they don't have a backyard anymore, Dean pulls Sammy down next to him in a corner of the library, where he can still keep Dad in sight, but the librarian can't see them. He picks up _The Runaway Bunny_\--it's Sam's favorite, too--and settles his back against the shelf, one arm wrapped around Sam's shoulders. Sam smells of baby shampoo and sweat, and Dean wishes he could explain what their mom smelled like, but he doesn't have the words.

He lets Sammy turn the pages, though he's got chubby little fingers with dirt under the nails and he rips one page a little by pulling it too hard. That's okay, though. Dean won't tell.

"You're my little bunny," Dean says before Sammy can start crying. He feels kind of stupid, but Sam laughs and claps his hands.

*

2\. _Little Women_ by Louisa May Alcott

Dad is gone again, three days this time, he says, and he doesn't have to remind Dean about what happened in Fort Douglas. Dean is alert and ready, and he has a stack of comics to keep away the boredom, and the book someone left behind in the desk drawer.

He's a fast reader, though, and by the middle of the second day, he's read all his comics more than once. Sammy's books are stupid, and he won't share with Dean anyway, and he pouts when Dean changes the channel away from Nickelodeon, so Dean can't even watch TV.

It's almost enough to make him wish he had homework. But not quite.

He pulls out the battered, dog-eared copy of a book called _Little Women_ that he'd found wedged into the desk drawer. The front cover has a picture of four girls in old-fashioned dresses on it, and the inside cover says, _Melissa Schoenberg_ in loopy, girlish handwriting, which means it's nothing Dean is interested in reading. He flings it against the wall in frustration, and Sam looks up from where he's coloring.

"You shouldn't treat books like that, Dean."

"Shut up."

Sam sticks his tongue out at Dean and goes back to coloring. At least this time he hasn't threatened to tell Dad.

Dean stomps around the room for a few minutes, and then goes over to where he threw the book and picks it up. With a put-upon sigh that Sam ignores completely, he settles into the squishy easy chair and opens it to page one.

_"Christmas isn't Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug._

Dean can sympathize with that.

It takes him a while to get into it (what kind of boy lets himself be called _Laurie_?), but he's got nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do, so he keeps reading, stopping only when Sammy says he's hungry.

Meg is kind of boring, and Amy is a brat like Sammy, but Jo is cool. And he imagines Mom in Marmee's place, tries to remember the sound of her voice and the way her hair smelled when she used to hold him.

Beth is Dean's secret favorite, though, and when she dies, he locks himself into the bathroom and cries like a little baby. He doesn't know how long he's been in there--his throat hurts and he has a headache and it's a little hard to breathe--when Sam starts banging on the door and yelling, "I have to pee, Dean! I have to pee!"

Dean splashes water on his face and then wipes it on the scratchy motel towel. He opens the door to find Sammy standing there, hopping from foot to foot, his pants already unzipped.

Dean forces himself to finish the book--he's still got nothing else to do--even though he doesn't even really care that much that stupid Amy gets to marry Laurie and Jo marries some old professor dude, because Beth's not there to see it. When he's done, though, he shoves it into the bottom of his duffel bag. Just in case he wants to read it again when he's bored or something.

Two weeks later, Sammy comes down with a cold, and Dean freaks out. He makes Dad buy chicken soup, he covers Sam with every blanket in the motel room when Sam says he feels cold, and when Sam says his throat is all scratchy and it hurts to swallow, Dean asks Dad to take him to the doctor.

"He could have scarlet fever and _die_," Dean says, trying to make Dad see how sick Sammy really is.

Dad pulls the door to the bedroom almost closed, leaves it open just enough to let the light get in because Sammy's afraid of the dark, and leads Dean to the little table in the kitchenette, where they both sit down to talk, man to man. "Okay, Dean, what's going on?"

"I told you, Sammy's sick and he could _die_."

"People don't die of scarlet fever, Dean. It's like having strep throat. A few days of antibiotics and you're fine."

Dean doesn't think before he blurts out, "Beth did."

Dad looks startled. "Beth?" He grabs Dean's shoulders tight. "Have you seen someone here in the room, Dean? Do we need to salt the door and the windows?"

"No, Dad. No. Nothing like that. I just, I read this book, and there was this girl, Beth, and she _died_."

Dad stares at him for a long moment. "You read _Little Women_?" he finally asks, and even though he's not smiling, Dean can hear it in his voice.

"I was _bored_. It was _stupid_."

Dad does smile now. "It was your mother's favorite book."

It's Dean's turn to freeze now, because Dad _never_ talks about Mom. Not when he's sober, anyway. "Oh."

"Yeah." Dad ruffles his hair. "We'll take Sammy to see the doctor in the morning if he's got a fever, okay, kiddo?"

"Okay, Dad."

Sammy's fine in the morning, and though Dean never stops worrying about _Sam_, he doesn't worry about scarlet fever anymore.

He still has that copy of _Little Women_, tucked away in the trunk of the car.

*

3\. _The Outsiders_ by S.E. Hinton

Dean stares at the shelves in the school library, chewing on his cuticles as the other kids skitter around, picking out their books and gossiping in hushed whispers. They have to pick a book to read and do a book report on every week, and Dean's run through the short list of books he's already read that Mrs. McGreevy, his new eighth grade teacher, would accept.

The librarian is a tall, angular lady named Mrs. Flood; some of the kids are scared of her, but Dean's seen scarier things, and she actually smells kind of nice--like chocolate chip cookies--when she leans in and says, "You might like this one, Dean," (she always calls him by name, though he's only been at this school for six weeks) and hands him a book called _The Outsiders_.

He shrugs and takes it, lets her check him out so he can get a head start on lunch. He's seen parts of the movie on television, knows Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze are in it, back when they were young and unknown, but it looked stupid, so he's never watched the whole thing.

That night after dinner, Dad is hunched over his journal, writing, and Sam is occupied with his math homework, chewing on his pencil as he tries to figure out long division without Dean's help, so Dean flops down onto the couch, pulls the book out of his backpack and starts reading.

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind--Paul Newman and a ride home.

Three hours later, he's blinking at the last sentence of the book, which is the same as the first. Which Dean thinks is pretty cool. For once, he finds it pretty easy to write a book report, because this book is all about things he understands.

He looks at Sam, asleep on the floor in front of the television, and thinks, Stay gold, Sammy, before he nudges him awake with his socked foot. "Come on, Sammy, it's time for bed."

For the first and last time in eighth grade, Dean gets an A on his book report.

Fourteen years later, as he drives to the crossroads, he knows exactly why Dally pulled his gun under that streetlight.

*

4\. _To Kill a Mockingbird_ by Harper Lee

Dean only picks up _To Kill a Mockingbird_ because he hears the librarian say parents want to ban it. He's more than a little disappointed to discover that not only doesn't it have any sex in it, but it's narrated by a six-year-old girl. Who reminds him a lot of Sammy, actually.

"Especially the girl part."

"You think you're so funny," Sam answers, face twisting in an annoyed frown. Dean's surprised his face hasn't frozen that way. "I'm surprised you even know how to read."

"Taught you, didn't I?"

"Whatever."

"Great comeback there, Sammy."

"It's _Sam_," he says, with all the scorn a thirteen-year-old can manage. The effect is ruined when he shoves a spoonful of Apple Jacks into his mouth, milk dribbling out the corners before he wipes it away.

"If you say so, Sammy."

"Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"How come we never meet any Boo Radleys?"

"What do you mean?"

"How come Dad only ever finds bad stuff in those old houses? How come it's never something scary on the outside but nice on the inside?"

Dean has to think fast, but he's used to Sam asking hard questions--he's a smart kid. "We're the Boo Radleys, Sam." He remembers all the looks they've gotten over the years--fear, pity, disgust--from people who have no clue what the world is really like. "Everybody thinks we're the crazy freaks, but we protect them from the monsters, so they don't have to worry about them."

Sam looks thoughtful. Dean knows he's been having a hard time at this new school--he's always been too smart, too wary, too _something_ to fit in, no matter how hard he tries, and in some places, it's worse than others. Dean remembers how unpleasant it could be, before he stopped caring what other people thought. He thinks about Atticus, and his definition of courage as knowing you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. It's something Sam already knows, and Dean doesn't think he had to teach him that.

Years later, when they're both a little drunk, lying on the hood of a junker in Bobby's yard after they took care of Dad's body, Sam says, "You know, I decided to be a lawyer because of Atticus Finch."

Dean takes another long sip of beer and says, "I know."

*

5\. John Winchester's journal

When the sheriff slams Dad's journal down onto the table, Dean has to work to keep the shock off his face. He hasn't seen it since he and Dad separated, hasn't read it cover to cover in a couple of years. There's a lot of new stuff, and some nights, when he should be sleeping, he sits up and reads while Sam tosses and turns in the other bed, fighting off his nightmares.

There's new material, and new understanding of old material that's come with age and experience, and they rely on it a lot, especially those first few months when they're just getting back in the swing of working together as a team. When Dean's not reading it, Sam's got his nose buried in it, and Dean can't help but remember that Christmas when Sam challenged him with it, dared him to admit the truth that was in those stained and wrinkled pages. Dean had been scared, and he'd been sorry that Sam'd had to find out that way (that Sam'd had to find out at all), but he'd been happy, too, to finally have someone else to share the secret with, the coolness of Dad's awesome book.

He and Sam both keep their own journals now, but occasionally, Dean will write something in Dad's, scribble in the margins, some new thing they've learned, or some lead they've finally tracked down and taken care of. The first time he did it, he hesitated for a second, remembering the first time Dad sat him down and explained what it was for, and how to read it, and how it wasn't a joke or a toy for him to play with.

It leads Sam to Roy LeGrange, and it takes Dean a long time to forgive Sam for that. He still hasn't quite forgiven himself.

After Dad dies, Dean spends hours poring over it, looking for some clue, some sign or instruction to tell him how he's supposed to save Sam. He doesn't have to look at all to remember how to summon the crossroads demon when Sam is laid out on a dusty mattress, skin going gray and heart unacceptably silent.

Now he sees Sam going through the same thing, rifling those handwritten pages as if they contain a secret all of Bobby's old books and contacts can't provide.

Dean is sure if the answer is in there, Sam will find it.

end

~*~


End file.
